Charlotte Perkins Gilman has long been understood through her
association with New England. Her Hartford birthplace, her
Providence childhood, her Beecher heritage, and her life-long
valorization of New England culture explain why. It is easy to find
ample evidence for her claim to a New England identity in her body
of public and private writing, as well as in Gilman scholarship.
Equally, she may be viewed as a nomadic figure who proudly embraced
her independence and mobility “at large” and who defies easy
categorization by region (Gilman, Living 181). But
what of her associations with the US West? Gilman was an
enthusiastic participant in “Booster Era” constructions of
California as what Charles Fletcher Lummis called “the new Eden of
the Saxon homeseeker” (M. Davis 26; Lummis qtd. in Starr,
Inventing 89), a project wherein the New England
intelligentsia was mobilized to construct a tradition of authentic
California literature (Starr, Inventing 92–93).
Gilman played an unacknowledged but active role in this late stage
of conquest, which “required the continuous interaction of
myth-making and literary invention with the crude promotion of land
values and health cures” (M. Davis 26). Like others of her
generation, she had moved west for her health, trumpeting
California’s benefits thereafter and actively calling on New
Englanders to “come here and live—calmly, wisely,
nobly, healthfully and happily” (“The Superior Northerner”
211). Boosters of California literary culture attempted to
render her a representative of the region, and she herself demanded
a visible role in Lummis’s promotional magazine, Land of
Sunshine. Undeniably, California was an important part of
Gilman’s personal and professional identity.

Some literary histories of California writing do mention Gilman.
And some Gilman scholars have begun to recognize her affiliations
with the West. Even so, and despite her avid participation in
Progressive Era boosterism, her own self-construction as a “New
England innocen[t]” has tended to prevail (Living
151); her role as a promoter of the Golden State, the
importance of the state to her subsequent work, and the
significance of her contradictory California attitudes to her
larger reform project have not yet been sufficiently explored. To
be sure, the question of her relationship to the West, particularly
to California, has presented an interpretive challenge. On the one
hand, she was an enthusiastic member of Lummis’s band of western
writers and contributed to his efforts to put California on the
literary map. Her writing is full of effusive praise for
California’s curative properties, exhibiting a yearning for the
state—as a literary identity, but also as a place associated with
health, freedom, progress, and peace. On the other hand, she
associated California with a regionalism that paled in comparison
to New England’s cultural cachet, with the economic hardship of
single motherhood, with resistance to and sometimes open ridicule
of her intellectual work, and with scandal over her divorce and
domestic arrangements—events that sent her fleeing eastward, “more
of a ‘wreck’ when she left California than when she arrived” (C.
Davis 118–19). Throughout her body of work, she is clear,
ironically, on one point: California was both her heaven and her
hell.

My aim here is not to resolve these contradictions but to argue
that they were, in fact, key elements of Gilman’s literary and
reform agenda; her residence in and opposing attitudes toward
California helped to shape her writing and social philosophy.
Gilman resided in California twice during her long life, for a
total of a mere eight years, not counting her many visits to the
state. After some waffling on the matter, she also ultimately
rejected the title of “California writer”; she was a New Englander
in California, something quite different indeed. In
her selfserving view, it was New England Anglo-Saxons who would
bring about “social improvements” in the West through their
purportedly superior stock and good influence (“Woman’s ‘Manifest
Destiny’” 335). Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss her California
years as a minor phase of her life, to interpret the state’s
presence in her work as mere...

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